Virgin Mary faced a harsh reality some 2,000 years ago

This year, for the first time in history, the historic little town of Bethlehem held a Christmas parade. There were floats plus all the other trappings required for a genuine parade.

More than 2000 years have passed since the original event. That’s time enough for a story to spread. Observers say Christmas is celebrated in much the same fashion by at least a few people in all the far-flung corners of the world.

Mysteries abound. It’s fair to wonder how Christmas reaches places lacking snow. We’ll soon be skidding around on ice. In some locations poinsettias grow to improbable heights. Their glossy red bracts tickle the eaves of houses. Ours are puny by comparison.

Below the equator, where summer has only just begun, Christmas is also coming. It might seem unreal to sing songs like “Jingle Bells” and “White Christmas” in mid-summer in Australia. On the other hand, if I spent all day hanging head-down on the underside of the earth, I might not notice.

We are captives of history and culture. Bethlehem was a sheep town 2000 years ago. The Virgin Mary was likely a tender teenager, perhaps below what we term “the age of consent.” Joseph, Mary’s bewildered fiancé, must have been a man of faith. He had to be, to go along with this unusual event.

The vaguest notions about the first Christmas have been grandly augmented by layers of neo-tradition. In a different age, Christmas might be retold as the improbable story of a God-child born to a virgin in a shabby motel garage near a dusty sheep town a hundred kilometers from home. But history and culture garnish Christmas with an incandescent beauty that belies the rudeness of the moment. Maybe Christmas serves as a diversion to offset our fear of harsher realities.

An angel reported, “A Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son. And you shall call his name Jesus.” It takes a bit to believe in angels bringing messages, unless the message directly involves the listener.

History and culture have brought a mixture both kind and unkind to Christmas. Mary and Joseph would have a tough time recognizing what they started a couple thousand years ago. But memories of the event thrive.

Scholars and lesser students have labored for centuries calculating an exact date for Christmas. The usual clues are considered; figure tax time, census time, conjunctions of planets creating a bright star in the heavens, and other enigmatic evidence.

It’s not hard to realize why we celebrate Christmas on December 25th. You’ve probably noticed the exact date occurs a few days following our winter solstice. Northern climates, where the Christmas story matured, can be fairly inhospitable in December after the sun goes wandering south. Winter chill sparks a craving for incandescence and celebration.

Driven by a combination of chilly bones and ancient superstition long before the time of Christ, clever folks decided to create some party time in late December. By late December, it becomes apparent to anyone with a south-facing window that the sun is returning home.

You can’t really blame folks who lack central heating for celebrating the return of the sun. That’s worth a party. In Rome they called the party Saturnalia. And the Romans celebrated as Romans will.

We may wonder about celebrating Christmas in Australia. There the warm summer sunshine has already reached the maximum. The sun is already headed north again. But Australia did not figure large in the minds of the folks in Rome who invented Saturnalia as their excuse to throw a serious party in December.

Saturnalia got pretty wild. Much drinking and revelry. Many ways to get into trouble. There is good evidence that the early Christian church fathers decided to co-opt the machinery of Saturnalia. They re-focused the energy of Saturnalia onto the festival we call Christmas.

Christmas means different things to different people. Some revelry of Saturnalia persists today.

The shepherds performed well at the first Christmas. As far as we know, they brought only curiosity to the stable in Bethlehem. They carried away only wonderment.

But those visiting kings really complicated things. They brought expensive gifts to the Christ-child in Bethlehem. The kings remain a universal part of Christmas. Their gifts may help explain the newest Christmas tradition called Black Friday.

We who hold Christmas dear in our hearts cannot complain greatly about everything Christmas has become. At least everyone around us knows it is Christmas. Others may celebrate differently. But the lights, the noise, the flurry of activity leave no question that something major is happening.

Looking around our neighborhood and others nearby, I’d say the Christmas season glows incandescent in the minds of most people. Everybody loves light this time of year. Strings of lights blow holes in the darkness.

Darkness begs illumination. The Light of the World sheds incandescence into darkened hearts everywhere. Christmas for all its crazy, commercial, carousing excesses still offers light to the world. Christmas is still the story of the Christ-child. Christmas is incandescence unlimited.

Only whiners and those legitimately mournful have any reason to mimic Scrooge about Christmas. May the incandescence of Christmas serve to heal their hearts.

I wish you and yours a wonderfully incandescent Christmas. A blessed Christmas to you!

Carl Welser is a reverend, a former Hamburg Fire Department firefighters and a regular columnist in the Livingston Daily. Email ccwelser@yahoo.com